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PayPalThere's a bit of drama going on with the popular game manager Lutris right now, with users pointing out the developer using AI generated code via Anthropic's Claude.
Seems like something relevant to talk about, with AI tools being a huge cause of problems in the hardware industry. Like how the Steam Deck is constantly sold out and Valve can't even give us a price or release date of their upcoming hardware. All because these AI companies are sucking up all component manufacturing for their data centres. Every extra person using all these AI tools is only adding to the issue.
A user asked on the official Lutris GitHub two weeks ago "is lutris slop now" and noted an increasing amount of "LLM generated commits". To which the Lutris creator replied:
It's only slop if you don't know what you're doing and/or are using low quality tools. But I have over 30 years of programming experience and use the best tool currently available. It was tremendously helpful in helping me catch up with everything I wasn't able to do last year because of health issues / depression.
There are massive issues with AI tech, but those are caused by our current capitalist culture, not the tools themselves. In many ways, it couldn't have been implemented in a worse way but it was AI that bought all the RAM, it was OpenAI. It was not AI that stole copyrighted content, it was Facebook. It wasn't AI that laid off thousands of employees, it's deluded executives who don't understand that this tool is an augmentation, not a replacement for humans.
I'm not a big fan of having to pay a monthly sub to Anthropic, I don't like depending on cloud services. But a few months ago (and I was pretty much at my lowest back then, barely able to do anything), I realized that this stuff was starting to do a competent job and was very valuable. And at least I'm not paying Google, Facebook, OpenAI or some company that cooperates with the US army.
Anyway, I was suspecting that this "issue" might come up so I've removed the Claude co-authorship from the commits a few days ago. So good luck figuring out what's generated and what is not. Whether or not I use Claude is not going to change society, this requires changes at a deeper level, and we all know that nothing is going to improve with the current US administration.
Emphasis on that last part ours. Emphasised because it's a clear issue for a lot of people, so the developer has chosen to just hide what is and what isn't AI generated code. The Lutris creator expanded on that in a follow-up post elsewhere further defending their use of it from another user not happy about the situation.
The real problem, as pointed out by comments, is that part of the point of open source is trust. This is not a way to build that. Not just that but copyright becomes an issue. Who actually owns the generated code? And now it's being hidden, how can anyone tell? Can you even truly claim it's open source when it's using AI generated code?
Update - 13/03/2026 11:10 UTC - The Lutris creator has restored the Claude attribution, with a comment noting "Since it's such a big fuss, I'm putting the Claude attribution back".
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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You can also find comments for this article on social media: Quoting: GerarderloperMeh, results matter. But also if stolen code ends up appearing; you don't want that happening.The bigger problem is that how fo you really even say code is stolen. A website built on tailwinds vs bootstrap and similar setups on both will look very close to the same, minus bootstrap being way more blaoted because it loads in everything.. Their structures can be different and you can even do similar features, bur much of the CSS and visuals for many sites based on bootstrap and css just go default routes and have a "samey" feel even when coded by hand
There is a risk when using AI coding tools where eventually it could turn into bloatware. So hopefully that isn't what will end up happening a couple years down the line.
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There is only so many ways to do something in code that unless its kike a section by section copy you'd never know and in some instances its going tl be a direct copy outside of naming conventions just because that is the way for it to perform.
The biggest problem claude has really is attribution because most of the stuff they train on is open source
Quoting: MakiThe big problem here is not so much whether AI was being used for it, but that the AI contributions are being hidden when there's feedback on it.It is redundant to be so against these tools. Also he removed it and put it back because if people just acting like fools about it. There is nothing wrong with ai tools.
If it wasn't, then anyone could have forked the project if they didn't want to use the AI contributions.
The forked project could then just weed out the AI contributions in a simple manner without having to go through the code line-by-line to hopefully spot whatever vulnerabilities or bugs the AI might have added.
Start fresh with just the human-made code and fix whatever was wrong with that.
Wherever the rights of AI or projects using AI end up at, it would have secured the potential for a project like Lutris to exist without it.
Lutris' maintainers could have just said "Yep, we're using AI. Fork it if you're not happy with it."
Done.
No knee-jerk reaction. They could have kept up complaining about not having enough contributors as they have for years now.
It's the assholery of it which is egregious and a point of concern for many beyond the use of AI.
Having said that, I vehemetly disagree with the use of AI for any FOSS projects. Please keep it far away from me.
My projects all shown what contributed as they are web yhkngs. All show Tailwinds. Symphony, laravel and so on used. Was using grapejs for a bit but just couldn't make it do what I wanted in a clean enough way even with the help of ai.
People that can code and develop use these things as tools and we might be plugging in code bases we already have made or used ourselves and are developing off that code. I took some ideas from other products similar to mine, but my tech stack differs. My architecture differs, my front end differs i have features sets they don't that allow for better SaaS like control and lets multiple people use it etc. Ive painstakingly still had to go test every little thing and fix certain things and so on. There are still little bits I want to add likr revision tracking, two-factor, changing over to industry standards for some stuff. Maybe get translations going and the add on/module support and tracking or a down payment
Evanjellion 2 hours ago
Quoting: CreepioAnother thing I wanted to quickly say is that, the Lutris dev mentioned he has depression and he's using Claude as a way to stay motivated to continue working on his project (my interpretation of things). He's doing this to try to make more progress on something that otherwise risks becoming abandonware, and right now I feel like he's being bullied for using AI. He felt bullied so he removed the claude attribution, and then he felt bullied again so he put it back. And now after reading a few comments here, I see people are canceling their Patreons over this. Bizarre. I don't know what the end-game is here. If being bullied is going to be the result of using AI, I question if applying any AI attribution in the first place is the right answer. This situation affects how I will choose to go about doing things in the near future if I plan to release any software.It's hard to find the motivation to do anything when you're depressed, I can understand the decision to use AI to make his workflow easier. It's more so the way he responded to everything that I think is the problem.
He seems to have known that people would react negatively to AI code, and his decision to deliberately hide what's hand-made and what's AI and say "lol good luck finding the code now" is just a really bad look. For one thing, as the initial article states, it makes it hard to trust what he puts out. It's also just kind of antithetical to the whole idea of open source projects when you're obfuscating code. He may have reversed his decision, but the damage is already done.
Last edited by Evanjellion on 13 Mar 2026 at 6:04 pm UTC
Quoting: CreepioAnother thing I wanted to quickly say is that, the Lutris dev mentioned he has depression and he's using Claude as a way to stay motivated to continue working on his project (my interpretation of things). He's doing this to try to make more progress on something that otherwise risks becoming abandonware, and right now I feel like he's being bullied for using AI. He felt bullied so he removed the claude attribution, and then he felt bullied again so he put it back. And now after reading a few comments here, I see people are canceling their Patreons over this. Bizarre. I don't know what the end-game is here. If being bullied is going to be the result of using AI, I question if applying any AI attribution in the first place is the right answer. This situation affects how I will choose to go about doing things in the near future if I plan to release any software.That is exactly what happens now. You use ai at all they try and bully you for it even if is plugging in code you made to develop it further. We are not allowed to use AI and open frameworks to develop straight forward things either. Its just ridiculous. Claude's only real problem is attribution stripping at times which you can specifically ask it not to do
Quoting: EvanjellionHe did not initially hide it though. He hid it after basically being bullied gor using AI to finish work he hasn't had the motivation to do on his own codebase... he then got bullied for removing the attribution because now he was trying to hide it. As another pointed out and I responded to it is basically coming down to people bullying developers using AI no matter whatQuoting: CreepioAnother thing I wanted to quickly say is that, the Lutris dev mentioned he has depression and he's using Claude as a way to stay motivated to continue working on his project (my interpretation of things). He's doing this to try to make more progress on something that otherwise risks becoming abandonware, and right now I feel like he's being bullied for using AI. He felt bullied so he removed the claude attribution, and then he felt bullied again so he put it back. And now after reading a few comments here, I see people are canceling their Patreons over this. Bizarre. I don't know what the end-game is here. If being bullied is going to be the result of using AI, I question if applying any AI attribution in the first place is the right answer. This situation affects how I will choose to go about doing things in the near future if I plan to release any software.It's hard to find the motivation to do anything when you're depressed, I can understand the decision to use AI to make his workflow easier. It's more so the way he responded to everything that I think is the problem.
He seems to have known that people would react negatively to AI code, and his decision to deliberately hide what's hand-made and what's AI and say "lol good just finding the code now" is just a really bad look. For one thing, as the initial article states, it makes it hard to trust what he puts out. It's also just kind of antithetical to the whole idea of open source projects when you're obfuscating code. He may have reversed his decision, but the damage is already done.
Quoting: EvanjellionI don't agree. I haven't thoroughly looked into this but if the only thing he's obfuscating is Claude attribution then that's massively exaggerating the severity of the situation.Quoting: CreepioAnother thing I wanted to quickly say is that, the Lutris dev mentioned he has depression and he's using Claude as a way to stay motivated to continue working on his project (my interpretation of things). He's doing this to try to make more progress on something that otherwise risks becoming abandonware, and right now I feel like he's being bullied for using AI. He felt bullied so he removed the claude attribution, and then he felt bullied again so he put it back. And now after reading a few comments here, I see people are canceling their Patreons over this. Bizarre. I don't know what the end-game is here. If being bullied is going to be the result of using AI, I question if applying any AI attribution in the first place is the right answer. This situation affects how I will choose to go about doing things in the near future if I plan to release any software.It's hard to find the motivation to do anything when you're depressed, I can understand the decision to use AI to make his workflow easier. It's more so the way he responded to everything that I think is the problem.
He seems to have known that people would react negatively to AI code, and his decision to deliberately hide what's hand-made and what's AI and say "lol good just finding the code now" is just a really bad look. For one thing, as the initial article states, it makes it hard to trust what he puts out. It's also just kind of antithetical to the whole idea of open source projects when you're obfuscating code. He may have reversed his decision, but the damage is already done.
And yes, him being acutely aware of how others feel and think about Ai probably does play a part in his attitude and seeing how people have reacted so far, I'd say his feeling aren't entirely unwarranted.
LinuxGamesTV 45 minutes ago
Quoting: Antonio StorckeThis is getting ridiculous. The author knows his software. I fully support this author. As I side note, I fully support the use of Claude. It is the ONLY AI That I am able to trust with my code. The hts-time app.You trust a war AI? A AI that delete all your work? I don't trus any AI. AI is the reason for the Ram crysis and you know that.
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